The Sentient Machine 1. THE EMERGING INTERNET OF THINGS Today, at this very moment, a kind of membrane is growing around all of us. We can liken this to a planetary skin or even a cortex at the center of our entire built environment. This network, the Internet of Things (IoT), is growing denser and denser as ANI makes more and more of our world “smarter.” The many billions of man-made objects that we interact with daily—cars, stoplights, toothbrushes, bridges—are being transformed from mere static forms to objects with cognition.

Before we look at the immediate implications of this growing intelligence, it’s worth considering how other intelligence “explosions” changed our ancient and preindustrial civilizations. When Australopithecus, or ancient man, started building tools 2.5 million years ago, for example, the crude stone objects he formed served only to more effectively harness the power of human muscle. These tools were not imbued with any form of locomotion independent from man. Fast forward in the story of human evolution to approximately fifteen thousand years ago, with the domestication of cattle, and five thousand years ago, with the domestication of horses, however, and we see “man” seeking out more sophisticated ways to leverage or augment his own muscle. This drive leads to the invention of mechanical devices such as the wheel in 3500 BC and the pulley in 1500 BC. In these innovations, the muscle-power of man is not just harnessed, it is magnified.

Although it took more than two million years, we finally graduated from crude tools shaped from stone and wood into developing systems imbued with their own source of power, independent from us. As long as the animals powering these devices were fed and the mechanisms maintained, we were able to use these systems to perform critical functions, such as raising water from a well and lifting large stones and logs. In the year 1698, with the evolution of the steam engine, we ultimately crossed a bridge into the beginnings of the industrial age. The steam engine enabled a means of making locomotion independent from any form of biology or nature. And in creating this locomotion, we could build bigger, faster, more resilient and powerful muscles than had ever been observed in nature.

Yet despite all this mechanistic prowess, these tools and systems always remained dependent on decisions made by us. We prescribed specific ranges of motion for them, and when one of them needed to be turned on or off, it was inevitably us, humans, pulling the switch. In the early nineteenth century, however, in a subtle shift of machine innovation, all that began to change.

• • •

It was 1801 and French weaver and inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard was looking for a way to create more sophisticated textile designs. Up until that moment, any design beyond basic lines needed to be hand-stitched, meticulously constructed by artisanal craftspeople. Jacquard realized, however, that he could bring a new flexibility to his sewing machines. He decided to teach them to interpret instructions, not just act out the prescribed sequence of movements that their mechanical design dictated. This idea revolutionized not just the textile industry, where it was used to weave a multitude of patterns on the same machine, but industry in general. The punched cards that encoded Jacquard’s designs—programs that defined patterns—were very similar to those used in computers a century and a half later. The act of separating form from function, or instructions from implementation, gave rise to the notion of programmability.

It wasn’t much more than a century and a half later that an entirely new discipline—computer science—emerged. Like the encoding in Jacquard’s looms, computer science evolved frameworks and processes for the efficient specification and execution of complex activities. This science concerned itself with ever-smarter ways of programming machines, and one of its subdisciplines—artificial intelligence—aimed to produce thinking machines entirely independent from humans, physically and mentally.

Today, 216 years after the Jacquard loom was invented, programmable computers the size of a fingernail can control powerful, miniaturized motors and obtain information from a plethora of digital sensors to sample, process, and respond to the real world. An ever-growing sophistication and intelligence in the programs that control these devices, ubiquitous connectivity between them, and a growing capability in the processors, sensors, and actuators to which they are connected promise to lead us into a future we can barely even imagine now.

Welcome to the Internet of Things revolution, an era when intelligence will be embedded everywhere, when synthetic devices and systems will make a growing number of decisions on their own. In this age of IoT, there will be billions of devices communicating with each other: negotiating, interacting, measuring, responding, and initiating all without any human input. In an effort to explain how I see this future evolving, I will paint a picture of IoT adoption in three waves. THE FIRST WAVE OF IOT: MEASURING AND TRACKING We are already firmly in the midst of the first wave of IoT. On the consumer side, we have wearables and gadgets that measure our pulse and heart rate, track how much we’ve walked over the past day, attempt to guess our circadian rhythm and activate an alarm when we’re sleeping lightly, and that automatically send pictures of our home to us when they suspect someone is at the front door—or someone is trying to break in.

On the business side, we have sensors embedded in almost every major industrial asset—from generators and turbines, to pumps, grids, and drilling equipment. These sensors are being used to gauge the more obvious aspects of a system’s performance. They measure things like temperature and pressure and store these measurements for subsequent human analysis. THE SECOND WAVE OF IOT: MODELING AND PREDICTING In some areas, we are on the cusp of entering the second wave of IoT where data captured from first-wave devices will be used by the devices themselves to model the environment, their own behavior, and the behavior of other systems to predict the future. For example, consumer wearables that simply monitor heart rate and pulse will evolve into wearable doctors that won’t stop at measurements, but will, instead, provide a full diagnosis as well as recommendations. In order to make this happen, a greater level of intelligence will need to be embedded in these devices, as will a larger number of sensors and environmental inputs. The cognitive capabilities of the devices themselves, or the networks they connect with, may include the ability to read and process natural language and inputs like photographs and video streams. Imagine a wearable that watches what you eat, figures out what it is, calculates the size and hence caloric intake, and uses that information to warn you of everything from relatively benign diet violations to the accidental ingestion of a food item that could trigger a life-threatening allergic response.

In the world of business, we’ll not only see machines monitoring basic elements of performance, but machines that will use these first-order data streams to evolve deep predictive models that look for higher-order interactions of measured quantities such as vibration, temperature, and pressure to uncover the complex physics that drive systems in the chaotic real world.

We’ll also see network-connected systems that don’t just sense but act in an increasingly sophisticated way. These systems will include delivery drones, self-driving trucks and tractors, and increasingly sophisticated factory and warehouse bots that use vision to detect objects and sort products and packages.THE THIRD WAVE OF IOT: A TRILLION FULLY AUTONOMOUS DEVICES In the third wave, the true potential of the IoT will materialize. We will have unlimited, easy to replicate, massively distributed, and federated network intelligence powering cognitive, fully autonomous devices. Sensors will become incredibly powerful not just because of the capabilities of the hardware, but because of the highly intelligent AI algorithms that will be able to fuse information from basic sensors into a coherent, granular, and complex picture of reality. This will offer a type of picture that goes far beyond what humans are able to build with their eyes, ears, smell, and touch. This will be a world that is perceived most profoundly by the intelligent devices that inhabit it. The humans who built those devices will be left, largely, unable to experience this reality.

This third wave of IoT will include autonomous and mobile systems that sense and avoid conflict in messy, real-world scenarios. Consider, for example, algorithms that empower fleets of hundreds of thousands of autonomous drones to carry out an ever-increasing range of functions for their human owners, from crop dusting to the delivery of emergency medical supplies to policing towns and cities to enabling the next generation of weapon systems in the form of autonomous hunter-killer swarms. As all of these activities power more and more of our built environment, the human starts to leave the loop. As we will see in the following chapters, this will cede decisions in our world to the burgeoning network all around us.

The Sentient Machine

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The Sentient Machine 1. THE EMERGING INTERNET OF THINGS Today, at this very moment, a kind of membrane is growing around all of us. We can liken this to a planetary skin or even a cortex at the center of our entire built environment. This network, the Internet of Things (IoT), is growing denser and denser as ANI makes more and more of our world “smarter.” The many billions of man-made objects that we interact with daily—cars, stoplights, toothbrushes, bridges—are being transformed from mere static forms to objects with cognition.

Before we look at the immediate implications of this growing intelligence, it’s worth considering how other intelligence “explosions” changed our ancient and preindustrial civilizations. When Australopithecus, or ancient man, started building tools 2.5 million years ago, for example, the crude stone objects he formed served only to more effectively harness the power of human muscle. These tools were not imbued with any form of locomotion independent from man. Fast forward in the story of human evolution to approximately fifteen thousand years ago, with the domestication of cattle, and five thousand years ago, with the domestication of horses, however, and we see “man” seeking out more sophisticated ways to leverage or augment his own muscle. This drive leads to the invention of mechanical devices such as the wheel in 3500 BC and the pulley in 1500 BC. In these innovations, the muscle-power of man is not just harnessed, it is magnified.

Although it took more than two million years, we finally graduated from crude tools shaped from stone and wood into developing systems imbued with their own source of power, independent from us. As long as the animals powering these devices were fed and the mechanisms maintained, we were able to use these systems to perform critical functions, such as raising water from a well and lifting large stones and logs. In the year 1698, with the evolution of the steam engine, we ultimately crossed a bridge into the beginnings of the industrial age. The steam engine enabled a means of making locomotion independent from any form of biology or nature. And in creating this locomotion, we could build bigger, faster, more resilient and powerful muscles than had ever been observed in nature.

Yet despite all this mechanistic prowess, these tools and systems always remained dependent on decisions made by us. We prescribed specific ranges of motion for them, and when one of them needed to be turned on or off, it was inevitably us, humans, pulling the switch. In the early nineteenth century, however, in a subtle shift of machine innovation, all that began to change.

• • •

It was 1801 and French weaver and inventor Joseph Marie Jacquard was looking for a way to create more sophisticated textile designs. Up until that moment, any design beyond basic lines needed to be hand-stitched, meticulously constructed by artisanal craftspeople. Jacquard realized, however, that he could bring a new flexibility to his sewing machines. He decided to teach them to interpret instructions, not just act out the prescribed sequence of movements that their mechanical design dictated. This idea revolutionized not just the textile industry, where it was used to weave a multitude of patterns on the same machine, but industry in general. The punched cards that encoded Jacquard’s designs—programs that defined patterns—were very similar to those used in computers a century and a half later. The act of separating form from function, or instructions from implementation, gave rise to the notion of programmability.

It wasn’t much more than a century and a half later that an entirely new discipline—computer science—emerged. Like the encoding in Jacquard’s looms, computer science evolved frameworks and processes for the efficient specification and execution of complex activities. This science concerned itself with ever-smarter ways of programming machines, and one of its subdisciplines—artificial intelligence—aimed to produce thinking machines entirely independent from humans, physically and mentally.

Today, 216 years after the Jacquard loom was invented, programmable computers the size of a fingernail can control powerful, miniaturized motors and obtain information from a plethora of digital sensors to sample, process, and respond to the real world. An ever-growing sophistication and intelligence in the programs that control these devices, ubiquitous connectivity between them, and a growing capability in the processors, sensors, and actuators to which they are connected promise to lead us into a future we can barely even imagine now.

Welcome to the Internet of Things revolution, an era when intelligence will be embedded everywhere, when synthetic devices and systems will make a growing number of decisions on their own. In this age of IoT, there will be billions of devices communicating with each other: negotiating, interacting, measuring, responding, and initiating all without any human input. In an effort to explain how I see this future evolving, I will paint a picture of IoT adoption in three waves. THE FIRST WAVE OF IOT: MEASURING AND TRACKING We are already firmly in the midst of the first wave of IoT. On the consumer side, we have wearables and gadgets that measure our pulse and heart rate, track how much we’ve walked over the past day, attempt to guess our circadian rhythm and activate an alarm when we’re sleeping lightly, and that automatically send pictures of our home to us when they suspect someone is at the front door—or someone is trying to break in.

On the business side, we have sensors embedded in almost every major industrial asset—from generators and turbines, to pumps, grids, and drilling equipment. These sensors are being used to gauge the more obvious aspects of a system’s performance. They measure things like temperature and pressure and store these measurements for subsequent human analysis. THE SECOND WAVE OF IOT: MODELING AND PREDICTING In some areas, we are on the cusp of entering the second wave of IoT where data captured from first-wave devices will be used by the devices themselves to model the environment, their own behavior, and the behavior of other systems to predict the future. For example, consumer wearables that simply monitor heart rate and pulse will evolve into wearable doctors that won’t stop at measurements, but will, instead, provide a full diagnosis as well as recommendations. In order to make this happen, a greater level of intelligence will need to be embedded in these devices, as will a larger number of sensors and environmental inputs. The cognitive capabilities of the devices themselves, or the networks they connect with, may include the ability to read and process natural language and inputs like photographs and video streams. Imagine a wearable that watches what you eat, figures out what it is, calculates the size and hence caloric intake, and uses that information to warn you of everything from relatively benign diet violations to the accidental ingestion of a food item that could trigger a life-threatening allergic response.

In the world of business, we’ll not only see machines monitoring basic elements of performance, but machines that will use these first-order data streams to evolve deep predictive models that look for higher-order interactions of measured quantities such as vibration, temperature, and pressure to uncover the complex physics that drive systems in the chaotic real world.

We’ll also see network-connected systems that don’t just sense but act in an increasingly sophisticated way. These systems will include delivery drones, self-driving trucks and tractors, and increasingly sophisticated factory and warehouse bots that use vision to detect objects and sort products and packages.THE THIRD WAVE OF IOT: A TRILLION FULLY AUTONOMOUS DEVICES In the third wave, the true potential of the IoT will materialize. We will have unlimited, easy to replicate, massively distributed, and federated network intelligence powering cognitive, fully autonomous devices. Sensors will become incredibly powerful not just because of the capabilities of the hardware, but because of the highly intelligent AI algorithms that will be able to fuse information from basic sensors into a coherent, granular, and complex picture of reality. This will offer a type of picture that goes far beyond what humans are able to build with their eyes, ears, smell, and touch. This will be a world that is perceived most profoundly by the intelligent devices that inhabit it. The humans who built those devices will be left, largely, unable to experience this reality.

This third wave of IoT will include autonomous and mobile systems that sense and avoid conflict in messy, real-world scenarios. Consider, for example, algorithms that empower fleets of hundreds of thousands of autonomous drones to carry out an ever-increasing range of functions for their human owners, from crop dusting to the delivery of emergency medical supplies to policing towns and cities to enabling the next generation of weapon systems in the form of autonomous hunter-killer swarms. As all of these activities power more and more of our built environment, the human starts to leave the loop. As we will see in the following chapters, this will cede decisions in our world to the burgeoning network all around us.

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The Coming Age of Artificial Intelligence

The Sentient Machine

The Coming Age of Artificial Intelligence

The future is now. Acclaimed technologist and inventor Amir Husain explains how we can live amidst the coming age of sentient machines and artificial intelligence—and not only survive, but thrive.

Artificial “machine” intelligence is playing an ever-greater role in our society. We are already using cruise control in our cars, automatic checkout at the drugstore, and are unable to live without our smartphones. The discussion around AI is polarized; people think either machines will solve all problems for everyone, or they will lead us down a dark, dystopian path into total human irrelevance. Regardless of what you believe, the idea that we might bring forth intelligent creation can be intrinsically frightening. But what if our greatest role as humans so far is that of creators?

Amir Husain, a brilliant inventor and computer scientist, argues that we are on the cusp of writing our next, and greatest, creation myth. It is the dawn of a new form of intellectual diversity, one that we need to embrace in order to advance the state of the art in many critical fields, including security, resource management, finance, and energy. “In The Sentient Machine, Husain prepares us for a brighter future; not with hyperbole about right and wrong, but with serious arguments about risk and potential” (Dr. Greg Hyslop, Chief Technology Officer, The Boeing Company). He addresses broad existential questions surrounding the coming of AI: Why are we valuable? What can we create in this world? How are we intelligent? What constitutes progress for us? And how might we fail to progress? Husain boils down complex computer science and AI concepts into clear, plainspoken language and draws from a wide variety of cultural and historical references to illustrate his points. Ultimately, Husain challenges many of our societal norms and upends assumptions we hold about “the good life.”

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Praise

“By situating the conversation around opportunities for AI to improve or extend our lives, this book provides a rational argument and reassurance to general readers fearful of an increasingly AI-infused future.” —Library Journal

“By situating the conversation around opportunities for AI to improve or extend our lives, this book provides a rational argument and reassurance to general readers fearful of an increasingly AI-infused future.” —Library Journal

“In The Sentient Machine, Amir Husain prepares us for a brighter future; not with hyperbole about right and wrong, but with serious arguments about risk and potential.” —Dr. Greg Hyslop, Chief Technology Officer, The Boeing Company

“Should Artificial Intelligence be feared or embraced? Which industries will be transformed next? Should we allow autonomous weapons in the military? Can machines be creative? This book provides a sound, technical perspective while tackling core questions about science, society and humanity. We’re at a crossroads, and I recommend this book to anyone seeking a balanced and reasoned view of the future.” —Professor Bruce Porter, Chairman, Department of Computer Sciences, University of Texas, Austin

“In The Sentient Machine, Amir Husain applies his brilliance to explaining the enormity of the implications of artificial intelligence, but does it with the skill of a mentor guiding his protegés to greater understanding. As it is emerging, AI may be the most profound force shaping every dimension of human existence in the 21st century. In this landmark book, Amir Husain lays bare not only the science of AI, but the many sectors in which AI will find a prominent role: from healthcare to warfare, where Mr. Husain is one of the leading theorists on the emerging concept of Hyperwar...warfare in the era of AI. The Sentient Machine is a must-read for all those who will live with the realities of the ‘AI Century.’” —General John R. Allen, USMC (Ret.) Former Commander, NATO International Security Assistance Force and U.S. Forces Afghanistan

“Whether you are a business leader, policy maker, or entrepreneur, you need to understand Artificial Intelligence and its power to shape our future. In his brilliantly written book, Amir Husain, one of the world's leading AI experts, will help you gain that understanding.” —John Chambers, Chairman Emeritus, Cisco Systems and Founder and CEO, JC2 Ventures

“Here is the book to read on AI and its implications. ‎Husain takes us through many important ideas that will shape our future, makes the complex simple and does so in clear, highly accessible prose. Do yourself a favor: buy this book and move into the future.” —John Thornton, Executive Chairman, Barrick Gold, Professor, Tsinghua University and Chairman, The Brookings Institution.

“Husain argues that the only way to deter intentional misuse [of A.I.] is to develop bellicose A.N.I. of our own: ‘The ‘choice’ is really no choice at all: we must fight AI with AI.’ If so, A.I. is already forcing us to develop stronger A.I.” —The New Yorker

“For those puzzled about how artificial intelligence and machine learning may impact their future, this book is a must read.” —Admiral Bobby R. Inman, US Navy, (Ret.), former Director of the National Security Agency, former Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency

“Amir Husain’s take on the coming age of AI is refreshing and inspired. He knows the technologies firsthand and has a keen eye for the philosophical and ethical implications, giving his readers the tools they need to assess the stakes. Unfortunately it’s not an option to download this excellent book directly to your brain… yet. For now, I strongly suggest you read it.” —Heather Berlin, PhD, MPH, Assistant Professor of Psychiatry, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai

“The Sentient Machine is a must-read for anyone looking to understand how artificial intelligence is poised to transform human society and life. Husain is not only an engineer and entrepreneur, but also a philosopher who thinks deeply about what AI will mean for humanity. Husain's optimistic outlook on the benefits of AI, grounded in an accessible description of the technology, is a welcome salve to many AI fears today.” —Paul Scharre, Director of the Technology and National Security Program, Center for a New American Security and Author of Army of None

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The Sentient Machine

The Coming Age of Artificial Intelligence

By Amir Husain

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About the Author

Amir Husain is an award-winning serial entrepreneur and inventor based in Austin, Texas. He serves on IBM’s Advisory Board for Watson & Cognitive Computing and is the Founder and CEO of SparkCognition, Inc., an award-winning company specializing in cognitive computing software solutions that help businesses and governments better respond to a world of ever-evolving threats. Husain speaks at numerous SXSW, defense, cybersecurity, computer science, energy, and environmental conferences. Amir and SparkCognition’s work has been featured in publications, such as Fast Company, Wired,Forbes, and TheNew York Times. The Sentient Machine is his first book.